One of the most challenging entrance exams ‘Common Admission Test (CAT)’ is scheduled to take place in the month of December, 2017. This highly anticipated entrance exam will be conducted by IIM Lucknow this year. IIM Lucknow already aired the notification of tender for advertisement services on June 21, 2017. IIM Lucknow convened CAT earlier in 2010. Currently, there are total 419 seats for PGP and other courses. About two lakh aspirants are expected to appear for this highly vying competition.

This time around, IIM Lucknow will introduce some changes in the structure of CAT 2017 as well as in the level of difficulty. There might be change in the number of questions in each section. The conducting body will try to bring down the difficulty level of Quantitative Aptitude to provide some favour to non-engineering aspirants. The new exam pattern is supposed to be quite student-friendly and will help aspirants to score better.

Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are known for imparting quality education in management and research. Previous year, CAT was conducted by IIM Bangalore across 138 cities and twenty aspirants were able to secure perfect 100 percentile. CAT 2017 registration process will kick-off in the month of August, 2017 following which admit cards will be released in the month of October, 2017. The exam will be conducted in two sessions to ensure fairness in comparison of performances of aspirants through separate test sessions. CAT 2017 will be an online mode exam of 170 minutes duration that will encompass three sections namely Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension (VARC), Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning (DILR) and Quantitative Ability (QA). The questions asked are multiple choice questions each of it carrying three marks and negative marks will be allocated for an incorrect answer.

CAT 2017 results will contain the list of candidates shortlisted for second stage of selection which may include Written Ability Test (WAT), Group Discussion (GD) and Personal Interviews (PI). Though, the basis of selection vary from IIM to IIM. The process of Normalization comes into play while evaluating marksheets. Normalization is an efficient process also adopted by Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE), it helps in comparing aspirant scores across multiple forms. CAT 2017 results will be expected to air in the month of January, 2018.

As per the feedbacks from last year toppers, it’s not only about amount of knowledge you have and practicing Mock tests daily but rather ultimately comes down to your performance during those 170 minutes and of course your confidence level. If you want to achieve desired percentile then you will need to attempt good number of challenging questions. Be consistent with your preparation to fare well at the main event. Make reading a habit, prefer authentic books, dedicate more time to quant section as it is the most scoring part and if you are pretty accurate then you will surely have edge over the other competitors.